scattered on the floor. The other half has an easel splattered with paint, rags, and a card table covered with tubes of oil paint. He explains his mother paints on one side, but the other is all his. I sit on his bed and smile, wanting him to join me. He’s acting weird and distant. I need him to touch me, to get close, inside me. I need to know he’s still mine. He starts to pick up his clothes from the floor.
“Forget those,” I say. I take off my shirt and dangle it over the floor. “I’m only going to mess it up again.”
He hesitates, but he looks at my chest. I straighten my back a little, pushing out my breasts. I smile again. He drops the clothes on a chair and comes to me. It’s so easy like that sometimes to get what I want. We have sex, using a condom. When it is over we lie together a moment. I bury my nose into his neck, smelling his scent. A car beeps, and Heath jumps up, pulling on his boxers, and looks out the open window.
“Denny,” he yells. “What’s up?”
“We’re going to Riverside,” the friend yells.
“I can’t, dude,” Heath says. He gestures back toward his bed, and me. “I’m busy.” He laughs, and Denny laughs too.
“Ah, OK, dude. I got it.”
I smile, liking this, being the object of Heath and his friend’s attention. Being the one Heath has sex with. When his friend leaves, though, Heath doesn’t come back into bed. He starts pulling on his clothes. I get up and do the same, figuring it’s what he wants. When we get down to the second floor, I ask to use the bathroom. Heath points to it.
“It’s small,” he says uncomfortably.
I go in and close the door behind me. The bathroom is indeed tiny and cluttered. There’s a brown stain in the sink. But I don’t care about that. Why does he think I care so much? I pee quickly and flush, then run the water and wipe my hands on a damp bath towel. He’s in his mother’s bedroom when I come out, but when I join him he quickly makes for the stairs again. He waits at the door.
“You better go,” he says. “My mom’s going to be home soon.”
“I’d like to meet your mom.”
He grimaces. “Maybe another time,” he says. “I’ve got a bunch of homework.”
I nod. “OK.”
I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him.
“I’ll miss you,” I whisper.
He pulls away first. “I’ll catch you later, OK?”
In the car, I try to shake off the feeling he’s going away. His words echo in my head. Maybe another time. There will be another time. He said it himself.
Since I can’t be with Heath as much as I would like, I fill the rest of my time with friends. I go to one of the Jennifers’ houses and do cocaine or we sit in the smoking sections of diners and drink coffee for hours. Jennifer B and I, it turns out, have many of the same interests. We drive together up Route 9W to Nyack, New York, a small, artsy town that has cute little shops full of goods made by local artists. We buy beads and handknit hats. We gossip about people at school. She has a boyfriend too, a cute Filipino boy a grade below us, and we exchange stories from our relationships. She’s been seeing her boyfriend for close to a year, so her stories are more dramatic, funnier. They have a lightness to them I can’t get to with Heath, aware as I am of this constant nagging feeling he’s about to end things with me. But I keep this to myself, laughing along with her when I talk about the weird way Heath doesn’t want me lingering in his house.
With all the regular sex I’m having, I start thinking about birth control. Until now, I know, I’ve been lucky. Only once or twice has a guy not initiated the use of a condom, and usually only because there were none around. I am rightfully scared about pregnancy. After one of those condomless nights with someone I barely knew, I was terrified I was pregnant. When my period came a few days late, I promised myself I would never ever do that again. But I did, leading to another pregnancy scare.
I’m afraid of pregnancy, but I’m not really afraid of STDs. I should be. This is the eighties, when AIDS has begun to destroy person after person, taking them down as if with a machine gun. One of my mother’s good friends has been diagnosed as HIV-positive, and another is already dead. But in the eighties, adolescent girls aren’t afraid of such things. AIDS is relegated to gay men and IV drug users. It will be a number of years before females, and then African American teenage girls, become the groups with the highest rate of growing AIDS cases. Being a young girl, I don’t think STDs can touch me. I assume, as many teenagers do, I am impervious to diseases like herpes and chlamydia. Those things just don’t happen to people like me. I’m more concerned about getting toxic- shock syndrome from tampons. Media hype has convinced me this is the thing to worry about. It’s the pregnancy worry that makes me call my mother one evening. She’s doing her residency now in gynecology in Chicago. She’ll be able to get me what I need.
“The Pill?” she asks when I tell her why I called. “You’re having sex?”
“I have a boyfriend,” I tell her, defensive. I sit cross-legged on my bedroom floor. I assumed telling her would be no big deal. She’s the one who pushed all those books—What’s Happening to Me? and Our Bodies, Ourselves—on Tyler and me when we were younger. She’s the one who told Tyler and me, too much actually, that sexual feelings were normal and healthy and even nice.
“I just want you to be careful,” she says.
“That’s why I want the pills.”
“Not just that kind of careful, though,” she says. She hesitates, and I wait, a sick feeling starting in my stomach. “Boys don’t like girls who give it away too easily.”
I set my mouth. “I told you, I have a boyfriend. We’ve been together for over a month.”
But inside, that sick feeling spreads.
She doesn’t say anything.
“Forget it,” I say. “I’ll just go to Planned Parenthood.”
“You should get an exam anyway.”
“To look for diseases?” I ask. I feel like I might cry.
“Everyone should get an exam before going on birth control.”
“I thought my own mother might help me out,” I say.
“I want to help.” Her voice is calm and steady. She’s using the tone she gets when it’s obvious my feelings are growing out of control. It’s patronizing and fake, and it’s one of the reasons I usually hide my feelings from her. “But I would never prescribe pills without an exam.”
When we hang up, I feel like I might throw up. I go to the kitchen and down a glass of water. I dial Heath’s number, but it just rings and rings. Then I go to the living room and flip on the TV. I do anything. Anything to get away from the fact that my own mother assumes I’m easy.
Rebecca grabs my arm and pulls me into the student lounge.
“You got me in trouble,” she says.
“What are you talking about?”
She sighs and looks around, making sure no one else can hear.
“Heath told Jeff you did it doggie-style with him,” she whispers. I bite my lip, embarrassed. “So?”
“I won’t, and now Jeff is saying if you do it with Heath, then I should too.”
“We only did it once like that,” I tell her.
“You know how they are,” she says.
I do. All the boys in Jeff’s crowd are obsessed with anything concerning sex. One ripped off a tag from an airplane life jacket that said jerk to inflate, and he wore it in his fly for the day until a teacher made him take it off. They all have this ongoing joke about doing it from behind. They answer every question that way: “What are you doing?” “Doggie.” “How would you like that prepared, sir?”
“Doggie.” They think it’s hysterical, but we girls roll our eyes.
“That’s so canine,” we tell them, which makes them laugh even harder. Now, though, I’ve been caught. Now Rebecca knows my rolling my eyes has been a bunch of crap. I think back to the time Heath and I had sex like that. I didn’t particularly want to. But Heath begged, and wanting to please him, I did. The whole time I hated it, how impersonal and dirty it felt, as though I could have been anyone beneath him.
